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This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris. Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets. As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime. In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions. The painting’s highly crafted surface, rigorous perspective, and grand scale pleased Parisian audiences accustomed to the academic aesthetic of the official Salon. On the other hand, its asymmetrical composition, unusually cropped forms, rain-washed mood, and candidly contemporary subject stimulated a more radical sensibility. For these reasons, the painting dominated the celebrated Impressionist exhibition of 1877, largely organized by the artist himself. In many ways, Caillebotte’s frozen poetry of the Parisian bourgeoisie prefigures Georges Seurat’s luminous Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, painted less than a decade later.

Hubert Beck, “Urban Iconography in Nineteenth-Century American Painting: From Impressionism to the Ashcan School,” in Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt, American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Art, Issues and Debates (Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities/University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 324; 326–27, fig. 5.

Kathleen Pyne, “Resisting Modernism: American Painting in the Culture of Conflict,” in Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt, American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Art, Issues and Debates (Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities/University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 290.

Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, entries written and compiled by Sally Ruth May (Art Institute of Chicago, 1993), p. 154 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, Treasures of 19th- and 20th-Century Painting: The Art Institute of Chicago, with an introduction by James N. Wood (Art Institute of Chicago/Abbeville, 1993), pp. 6, 21, 69 (ill.), 325.

Norma Broude, “Outing Impressionism: Homosexuality and Homosocial Bonding in the Work of Caillebotte and Bazille,” in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. Norma Broude (Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 124, 127.

Gabriel P. Weisberg, “The Urban Mirror: Contrasts in the Vision of Existence in the Modern City,” in Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century France, exh. cat. (Portland Museum of Art, 2006), pp. 46; 47, fig. 35.

Shimbata Yasuhide, “Caillebotte and the Modern City of Paris: In a Time of Upheaval,” in Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist in Modern Paris, ed. Shimbata Yasuhide, exh. cat. (Bridgestone Museum of Art/Ishibashi Foundation, 2013), p. 268.

Sold by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., New York, to Wildenstein and Company, 1964. [See Joseph Baillio, Wildenstein and Company, to Gloria Groom, Feb. 11, 2015, e-mail correspondence, curatorial object file, Art Institute of Chicago, in which Baillio suggests that an agent working on Chrysler’s behalf may have facilitated the sale.]

Sold by Wildenstein and Company, New York, to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1964. [See minutes from the meeting of the Committee on Earlier Painting and Sculpture of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nov. 25, 1964, and minutes from the meeting of the Board of Trustees, Dec. 21, 1964, both on file in Institutional Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.]